ajaroflightningbugs

[ajaroflightningbugs]

”character’s eyes glow when they’re using their powers” but the inside of their mouth is also glowing. and also blood if they get hurt. it’s just all the living tissue that does it.

[ajaroflightningbugs]

thinkin about the chosen one story told from the pov of the person standing next to them again. thinkin about the one who has to stand by and watch the chosen one become a weapon, a sacrifice, an offering to the machinations of plot and can do nothing but make sure they’re fed and rested and soothe them when they wake up screaming from nightmares. thinkin about the fierce devotion that has to exist to follow someone to the end of the world just so they don’t have to die alone. thinkin about the terror they’d feel every step of the journey knowing it’s not their place to change how the story plays out. thinkin thinkin thinkin.

[ajaroflightningbugs]

“The stone corrupts all those who wield it, it is fueled by their ambitions and dreams. So we need someone with no ambitions, no dreams, someone who doesn’t care about what the future holds for themselves. That’s why we found you.”

[ajaroflightningbugs]

You are the adventurer who went on an epic quest and defeated the evil king, all to gain the sacred amulet and use its one wish to revive your sister. Now everyone expects you to accept her death and use the wish to undo the damage instead. You refuse.

[ajaroflightningbugs]

narratively I am a fan of romances that don’t ever actually become romances

I don’t mean in an aromantic life partner way, I mean romantic tension that is never resolved or acted upon for whatever reason but by the end it’s clear that both characters experienced the love of their lives without ever acknowledging it as such. but they know. they know.

[ajaroflightningbugs]

hello character who is desperate to be a good person; i want to play a game. in front of you is the one person you will never be able to save. you have the rest of your life to make peace with this. there are no defined repercussions if you fail, but we both know you're going to attempt to win regardless. your time starts now

[ajaroflightningbugs]

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Climb aboard, then!” But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown. “Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.” 

“I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”

___

…But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the frog felt a subtle motion on its back, and in a panic dived deep beneath the rushing waters, leaving the scorpion to drown.

“It was going to sting me anyway,” muttered the frog, emerging on the other side of the river. “It was inevitable. You all knew it. Everyone knows what those scorpions are like. It was self-defense.”

___

…But no sooner had they cast off from the bank, the frog felt the tip of a stinger pressed lightly against the back of its neck. “What do you think you’re doing?” said the frog.

“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

They swam in silence to the other end of the river, where the scorpion climbed off, leaving the frog fuming.

“After the kindness I showed you!” said the frog. “And you threatened to kill me in return?”

“Kindness?” said the scorpion. “To only invite me on your back after you knew I was defenseless, unable to use my tail without killing myself? My dear frog, I only treated you as I was treated. Your kindness was as poisoned as a scorpion’s sting.”

___

…“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

“You have a point,” the frog acknowledged. “But once we get to dry land, couldn’t you sting me then without repercussion?”

“All I want is to cross the river safely,” said the scorpion. “Once I’m on the other side I would gladly let you be.”

“But I would have to trust you on that,” said the frog. “While you’re pressing a stinger to my neck. By ferrying you to land I’d be be giving up the one deterrent I hold over you.”

“But by the same logic, I can’t possibly withdraw my stinger while we’re still over water,” the scorpion protested.

The frog paused in the middle of the river, treading water. “So, I suppose we’re at an impasse.”

The river rushed around them. The scorpion’s stinger twitched against the frog’s unbroken skin. “I suppose so,” the scorpion said.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Absolutely not!” said the frog, and dived beneath the waters, and so none of them learned anything.

___

A scorpion, being unable to swim, asked a turtle (as in the original Persian version of the fable) to carry it across the river. The turtle readily agreed, and allowed the scorpion aboard its shell. Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell. The turtle, swimming placidly, failed to notice.

They reached the other side of the river, and parted ways as friends.

___

…Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell.

The turtle, hearing the tap of the scorpion’s sting, was offended at the scorpion’s ungratefulness. Thankfully, having been granted the powers to both defend itself and to punish evil, the turtle sank beneath the waters and drowned the scorpion out of principle.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” sneered the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back.”

The scorpion pleaded earnestly. “Do you think so little of me? Please, I must cross the river. What would I gain from stinging you? I would only end up drowning myself!”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Even a scorpion knows to look out for its own skin. Climb aboard, then!”

But as they forged through the rushing waters, the scorpion grew worried. This frog thinks me a ruthless killer, it thought. Would it not be justified in throwing me off now and ridding the world of me? Why else would it agree to this? Every jostle made the scorpion more and more anxious, until the frog surged forward with a particularly large splash, and in panic the scorpion lashed out with its stinger.

“I knew it,” snarled the frog, as they both thrashed and drowned. “A scorpion cannot change its nature.”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. The frog agreed, but no sooner than they were halfway across the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown.

“I’ve only myself to blame,” sighed the frog, as they both sank beneath the waters. “You, you’re a scorpion, I couldn’t have expected anything better. But I knew better, and yet I went against my judgement! And now I’ve doomed us both!”

“You couldn’t help it,” said the scorpion mildly. “It’s your nature.” 

___

…“Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”

“Alas, I was of two natures,” said the scorpion. “One said to gratefully ride your back across the river, and the other said to sting you where you stood. And so both fought, and neither won.” It smiled wistfully. “Ah, it would be nice to be just one thing, wouldn’t it? Unadulterated in nature. Without the capacity for conflict or regret.”

___

“By the way,” said the frog, as they swam, “I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s on the other side of the river?”

“It’s the journey,” said the scorpion. “Not the destination.”

___

…“What’s on the other side of anything?” said the scorpion. “A new beginning.”

___

…”Another scorpion to mate with,” said the scorpion. “And more prey to kill, and more living bodies to poison, and a forthcoming lineage of cruelties that you will be culpable in.”

___

…”Nothing we will live to see, I fear,” said the scorpion. “Already the currents are growing stronger, and the river seems like it shall swallow us both. We surge forward, and the shoreline recedes. But does that mean our striving was in vain?”

___

“I love you,” said the scorpion.

The frog glanced upward. “Do you?”

“Absolutely. Can you imagine the fear of drowning? Of course not. You’re a frog. Might as well be scared of breathing air. And yet here I am, clinging to your back, as the waters rage around us. Isn’t that love? Isn’t that trust? Isn’t that necessity? I could not kill you without killing myself. Are we not inseparable in this?”

The frog swam on, the both of them silent.

___

“I’m so tired,” murmured the frog eventually. “How much further to the other side? I don’t know how long we’ve been swimming. I’ve been treading water. And it’s getting so very dark.”

“Shh,” the scorpion said. “Don’t be afraid.”

The frog’s legs kicked out weakly. “How long has it been? We’re lost. We’re lost! We’re doomed to be cast about the waters forever. There is no land. There’s nothing on the other side, don’t you see!”

“Shh, shh,” said the scorpion. “My venom is a hallucinogenic. Beneath its surface, the river is endlessly deep, its currents carrying many things.” 

“You - You’ve killed us both,” said the frog, and began to laugh deliriously. “Is this - is this what it’s like to drown?” 

“We’ve killed each other,” said the scorpion soothingly. “My venom in my glands now pulsing through your veins, the waters of your birthing pool suffusing my lungs. We are engulfing each other now, drowning in each other. I am breathless. Do you feel it? Do you feel my sting pierced through your heart?”

“What a foolish thing to do,” murmured the frog. “No logic. No logic to it at all.”

“We couldn’t help it,” whispered the scorpion. “It’s our natures. Why else does anything in the world happen? Because we were made for this from birth, darling, every moment inexplicable and inevitable. What a crazy thing it is to fall in love, and yet - It’s all our fault! We are both blameless. We’re together now, darling. It couldn’t have happened any other way.”

___

“It’s funny,” said the frog. “I can’t say that I trust you, really. Or that I even think very much of you and that nasty little stinger of yours to begin with. But I’m doing this for you regardless. It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s strange. Why would I do this? I want to help you, want to go out of my way to help you. I let you climb right onto my back! Now, whyever would I go and do a foolish thing like that?”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”  

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Come aboard, then!” But no sooner had the scorpion mounted the frog’s back than it began to sting, repeatedly, while still safely on the river’s bank.

The frog groaned, thrashing weakly as the venom coursed through its veins, beginning to liquefy its flesh. “Ah,” it muttered. “For some reason I never considered this possibility.”

“Because you were never scared of me,” the scorpion whispered in its ear. “You were never scared of dying. In a past life you wore a shell and sat in judgement. And then you were reborn: soft-skinned, swift, unburdened, as new and vulnerable as a child, moving anew through a world of children. How could anyone ever be cruel, you thought, seeing the precariousness of it all?” The scorpion bowed its head and drank. “How could anyone kill you without killing themselves?”

[ajaroflightningbugs]

calling all authors!!

i have just stumbled upon the most beautiful public document i have ever laid eyes on. this also goes for anyone whose pastimes include any sort of character creation. may i present, the HOLY GRAIL:

https://www.fbiic.gov/public/2008/nov/Naming_practice_guide_UK_2006.pdf

this wonderful 88-page piece has step by step breakdowns of how names work in different cultures! i needed to know how to name a Muslim character it has already helped me SO MUCH and i’ve known about it for all of 15 minutes!! i am thoroughly amazed and i just needed to share with you guys 

[ajaroflightningbugs]

My turn to make a hyperspecific poll

[ajaroflightningbugs]

I would like to nominate “You promised” “I know” as one of the most heartbreaking exchanges in the english language

[ajaroflightningbugs]

Alec Temera has been dead for years, she realizes, now- only now, bearing witness as the inferno consumes his ghost. Alec Temera died one scorching summer day in early June all those years ago, and she was blind to it; of course she was. She has spent so much time mourning the living that she's forgotten how to mourn the dead.

She turns away, and lets the fire burn. Nothing could escape it; nothing mortal, nothing real. Any creature that survives is not a creature she would recognize. It's far too late for that.

[ajaroflightningbugs]

I love my OC!

*puts him through the horrors* *puts him through the horrors* *puts him through the horrors* *puts him through the horrors* *puts him through the horrors* *puts him through the horrors* *puts him through the horrors* *puts him through the hor

[ajaroflightningbugs]

Sora channels in a really weird way, actually. She figures out, pretty early in Coalition training, that she can accumulate voltage using her body as a conductor and discharge it all at once in a single arc, and then that the ideal way to do so is to mostly keep it to her blood.

This leads to some fascinating physical manifestations.

When she's young, some of her electricity leaks out and ionizes the air around her. She kills this inefficiency entirely after a few years, but for the rest of her career the smell of ozone is very strongly affiliated with Angel's presence. So much so, actually, that later on when she arrives at public, formal events she ionizes the air intentionally- just a little bit, just enough to make a faint smell.

When she passes a certain threshold of voltage, there's so much energy in her that the relatively small amount that burns off passively starts overheating her. For awhile she thinks she's hit a ceiling on how much electricity she can throw- it's Golden Oriole, one of her sentinel apprentices, who comes up with a workaround: she wouldn't overheat as much, he suggests, if she could force the passive dissipation as light instead of heat.

Of course, when she does figure out how to do that, it has the fun effect of inducing a ton of electromagnetic radiation. Some visible light, especially around her mouth and hands, but mostly radio waves; anything with a radio receiver is going to be nothing but static while she's all charged up, and things with magnets all go sideways. All the electric field she induces means her comms need to be Faraday caged so they don't just fry whenever she goes out, but she's accidentally broken not a few electronics anyway.

After she accidentally fries a transformer in downtown Manhattan, throwing a good few blocks into blackout for almost a day, she intentionally learns where all grid infrastructure equipment is that she could really damage so to avoid doing just that as much as possible. Lightning throwers are rare but not non-existent, and most cities have pretty sturdy surge protection for it, but she doesn't want to make their jobs any harder than they have to be, and transformers are expensive.

[ajaroflightningbugs]

The thing is that the story isn’t over when Alec dies.

The thing is that Sora is still alive.

She is forty-four years old. She is forty-four years old and alone in a city that always felt like her best friend’s more than her own, and she doesn’t know why it seems so different now.

She works with the Coalition for five or six more years. But she’s done well for herself as both an engineer and a sentinel- she doesn’t need to keep doing this. She is fifty when she finally sets down the helm for good, and moves to Boston.

An old promise, perhaps.

She lives under the Massachusetts snow for around twenty years. They’re quiet years, and lonely ones, because even Halen is barely a part of her life anymore.

(He calls, sometimes. But he’s not the man she knew all those years ago, and she never got a chance to know the man he’s become since then.)

She doesn’t regret a single one.

But she takes a vicious spill when she’s seventy-two, give or take. It’s such a horribly ordinary thing. Everything she’s survived, everything she’s endured, and she’s broken her hip slipping on slick ice.

Her brother calls her, after that. He asks her to come home.

Once she’s walking again, she calls him back. She agrees.

And it hurts- hurts more than she expected it to, going back to San Francisco. It doesn’t even make any sense. She never knew him there. They met at school. But she knows, deep in her bones, her soul, that when she leaves this city now, she will never, ever see it again.

She’s leaving the east coast, and Alec’s grave, for the last time.

She gets an apartment across the street and two buildings down from her brother. She raises his grandchildren. She passes messages for the Jackdaw Circle, from time to time. She learns embroidery. She writes a book that she’ll never be able to publish- a memoir, a record, a tell-all, really, from the day she met Alec Temera to the day he died; in it she admits, plainly, that she was Angel and he the Dreamweaver, that he was blind, and that she knew the entire time.

She is ninety-eight years old. She dies just past noon.

[ajaroflightningbugs]

“Keep your head down,” he hisses. “This isn’t something you want to get tangled up in.”

Sora snaps her head around to stare at him incredulously. “Get tangled up- Alec, that man, they’re going to take-”

“And they’ll kill you if you interrupt. Probably kill me too, just in case. They’ll never find the bodies.”

His hand resting on the small of her back has turned tense. He’s staring forward intently, eyes hooded as he hustles her down the street and around the corner.

“Were they- Alec, who were those men? Were they the mob, or what?”

Alec bites his lip. He doesn’t met Sora’s eyes.

“Not the mob, not really, but that’s also... not wrong? They’re... you don’t want to catch their attention. Please, Sora, just take my word for it, and if you ever see them again, if you ever see something like that going on around here- promise me you won’t get involved.”

“Alec...”

“Promise me.” His eyes flash under the yellow streetlights as he jerks his head up, expression unreadable in the dim lighting.

“Okay,” she yields quietly. “I won’t get involved.”

As if a balloon let out of air, Alec seems to collapse into himself. He looks away. "You can’t fix everything. I’m sorry.”

Sora blinks her eyes clear, rocks back on her heels. “How’ve you made it this long around here, Alec? You’re not the type for this- this viciousness.”

He smiles, a little crooked, a little bitter. “I know how to keep my business to myself.”

.

.

.

.

.

"Keep your business to yourself, huh,” she says softly, steadily.

Alec flinches as if struck. “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, you know that.”

“You lied to me.”

“What was I supposed to do, Sor?” he protests. “Tell you from the outset?”

“Not pass yourself off as something you’re not. Tell me, what was your plan? Lie to me for the rest of our lives?”

He stares, dark eyes wide. “Yeah, kind of,” he admits. “Maybe not the rest of our lives. Probably not the rest of our lives. But... I mean. Sor, this is what I was afraid of. Can you really blame me?”

“Yeah, I can,” she lets out in a breath. “I can blame you so much. Shit, Temera.”

He makes a soft, wounded sound, low in his throat, and takes a hesitant step toward her. She instantly hops back, half-stumbling, to keep the distance between them. He freezes.

“I need space. I need to be alone. Just- just for now. Please leave me alone.”

He blinks rapidly, then nods, a short, sharp little motion. Already the shy creature she’s been looking at is melting away, back behind Alec’s steady, relentless shields.

And then, in an instant, he’s gone.

(And she’s alone.)

[ajaroflightningbugs]

y’all love the morally gray, snarky, grief stricken characters until it’s a woman. i’ve seen so much discourse regarding female characters who display the exact same character traits as male leads and are criticized for it while the men are praised. let women be cruel and vindictive. let them deal with their grief and trauma in destructive ways. let them be real. give them the same treatment you would give to your favorite male love interest.